The Beginnings Of Scott V. Sandford

"Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man's nature--opposition
to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and
when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them,
shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow." (Abraham
Lincoln)[1]

During the 1850's in the United States, Southern support of slavery and Northern opposition to it collided more violently than ever before over the case of Dred Scott, a black slave from Missouri who claimed his freedom on the basis of seven years of residence in a free state and a free territory. When
the predominately proslavery Supreme Court of the United States heard Scott's case and declared that not only was he still a slave but that the main law
guaranteeing that slavery would not enter the new midwestern territories of the United States was unconstitutional, it sent America into convulsions. The turmoil would end only after a long and bloody civil war fought primarily over the issue of slavery and its extension into America's unorganized territories. The Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford helped hasten the arrival of the American Civil War, primarily by further polarizing the already
tense relations between Northerners and Southerners.

America in 1857 was, as Kenneth Stampp put it, "a Nation on the
Brink."[2] Relationships between the Northern and
Southern states had been strained for decades, but during the 1840's and
especially the 1850's, the situation exploded. The Compromise of 1850 served
as a clear warning that the slavery issue, relatively dormant since the Missouri
Compromise of 1820, had returned. As territories carved out of the Mexican
cessions of 1848 applied for statehood, they stirred a passionate and often
violent debate over the expansion of the South's "peculiar institution."
Proslavery and antislavery forces clashed frequently and fatally in "Bleeding
Kansas," while the presidential election of 1856 turned ugly when southern
states threatened secession if a candidate from the antislavery Republican
party won. Into this charged atmosphere stepped a black slave from Missouri
named Dred Scott.

Scott's beginnings were quite humble. Born somewhere in Virginia, he
moved to St. Louis, Missouri, with his owners in 1830 and was sold to Dr. John
Emerson sometime between 1831 and 1833. Emerson, as an Army doctor, was a frequent
traveler, so between his sale to Emerson and Emerson's death in late 1843,
Scott lived for extended periods of time in Fort Armstrong, Illinois, Fort
Snelling, Wisconsin Territory, Fort Jessup, Louisiana, and in St. Louis.
During his travels, Scott lived for a total of seven years in areas closed to
slavery; Illinois was a free state and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had
closed the Wisconsin Territory to slavery. When Scott's decade-long fight for
freedom began on April 6, 1846, he lived in St. Louis and was the property of
Emerson's wife.

The famous Scott v. Sandford case, like its plaintiff, had relatively
insignificant origins. Scott filed a declaration on April 6, 1846, stating
that on April 4, Mrs. Emerson had "beat, bruised, and ill-treated him" before
imprisoning him for twelve hours.[3] Scott
also declared that he was free by virtue of his residence at Fort Armstrong
and Fort Snelling. He had strong legal backing for this declaration; the Supreme
Court of Missouri had freed many slaves who had traveled with their masters in
free states. In the Missouri Supreme Court's 1836 Rachel v. Walker
ruling, it decided that Rachel, a slave taken to Fort Snelling and to Prairie
du Chien in Illinois, was free. Despite these precedents, Mrs. Emerson won
the first Scott v. Emerson trial by slipping through a technical loophole;
Scott took the second trial by closing the loophole. In 1850, the case reached
the Missouri Supreme Court, the same court that had freed Rachel just fourteen
years earlier. Unfortunately for Scott, the intervening fourteen years had
been important ones in terms of sectional conflict. The precedents in his
favor were the work of "liberal-minded judges who were predisposed to favor
freedom and whose opinions seemed to reflect the older view of enlightened
southerners that slavery was, at best, a necessary evil."
[4] By the early 1850's, however, sectional
conflict had arisen again and uglier than ever, and most Missourians did not
encourage the freeing of slaves. Even judicially Scott was at a disadvantage;
the United States Supreme Court's Strader v. Graham decision (1851) set
some precedents that were unfavorable to Scott, and two of the three justices
who made the final decision in Scott's appearance before the Missouri Supreme
Court were proslavery. As would be expected, they ruled against Scott in 1852,
with the third judge dissenting. Scott's next step was to take his case out
of the state judicial system and into the federal judicial system by bringing it
to the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Missouri.